Update page.

August 11, 2008: Nick Barnes and staff at Ravenbrook Limited have generously offered to reprogram the GISTEMP analysis using python only, to make it clearer to a general audience. In the process, they have discovered in the routine that converts USHCN data from hundredths of °F to tenths of °C an unintended dropping of the hundredths of °F before the conversion and rounding to the nearest tenth of °C. This did not significantly change any results since the final rounding dominated the unintended truncation. The corrected code has been used for the current update and is now part of the publicly available source.

What Gary (40) said. And let me add this — given the enormous impact that the proposed policy changes will have on the world, especially the poor, there are moral implications involved.

I think the more interesting question you should be asking is why, given the enormous sums being budgeted, the questions being asked here haven’t already been asked by others years ago?

Where is all the vaunted review process we keep hearing about? Mann’s hockey stick was a revolution which completely wiped out everything scientists had known for centuries about the MWP and Little Ice Age. Despite the drastic rewriting of history, it became science gospel less than a year after it came out. And no one checked his data and no one checked his stats. The worst abuse is not the disaster that Mann’s study turned out to be. It is the fact that no one connected to the IPCC bothered to check his work. That alone ought to frighten every person on the planet right down to the toes.

Scientist Says Budget Office Altered His Testimony

The White House’s Office of Management and Budget has changed the text of testimony scheduled to be delivered to Congress by a top Government scientist, over his protests, making his conclusions about the effects of global warming seem less serious and certain than he intended.

Senator Albert Gore, Democrat of Tennessee and chairman of the subcommittee, who had been told by Dr. Hansen of the alterations in the testimony, said that White House officials were attempting to change science to make it conform to their policy rather than base policy on accurate scientific data.

”They are scared of the truth,” Mr. Gore said. He charged that the testimony was censored to support those in the Office of Management and Budget and other parts of the Administration who are seeking to keep the United States from proposing an international treaty to ameliorate the now widely anticipated global warming trend.

He’s gotten a lot of press for someone whose views are “suppressed”.

The only positive thing is that they did not name the folder 666 or Beezelbub.

Yes, we’ve seen some of Mann’s code, which was produced only at the request of the House Energy and Commerce Committee – and this only after he drew attention to himself by telling the Wall St Journal that he wouldn’t disclose his algorithm. However Mann’s code was incomplete and did not work with any available data sets. It showed however that he calculated the verification r2 statistics, that he later denied ever calculating.

Hansen did not disclose his code willingly either. I asked to see his code in order to analyze questions that led to the Y2K problem – he refused. Even after the Y2K problem was identified, he refused. But that issue got a lot of publicity and this was one issue and one occasion where his bosses were able to tell him to do something and it appears that they made him disclose his code. But it was done very unwillingly.

Hansen’s code disclosure is far more thorough than Mann’s. However, it’s even more opaque than Mann’s which hardly seemed possible ahead of time.

Call me naive, but have you seen anything like this from Mann?